Integrating news into your website

Requirements

Using neatComponents development platform to integrate news feeds working inconjunction with constantcontact.com emails.

What we did

Acquisita decided to subscribe to constantcontact.com to produce and maintain news with its customer base. After producing the mailshots we wanted to extend the use of the news feature and make the information available via the website.

We addded a new database and embedded the HTML produced within constantcontact.com

1. News Database

2. Creating a query to view the news on the homepage

We were able to add a simple query that produced a summary listing of the news item and we added it to the homepage based on a flag. If the Public? flag is set to TRUE the news item is displayed to any user browsing the page.

When the user clicks on the news link the news article that was originally created in constantcontact.com is viewable. The HTML however resides within the Acquisita website.

News

Alternative Strategy

What we could have done to solve this problem instead was to create the news and HTML within the neatcomponents platform. The additional task would of required us to create a CRM type database of client information. It was feasible to do this, but we decided on this occasion that is was better to use a combination of both technologies. One of the key advantages of using constantcontact.com was the application is tried and tested and we wanted to produce the solution quickly. By combining the output with the website we created additional value with little extra effort.